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Bing’s Mobilegeddon is coming soon

Google’s Mobilegeddon forced many companies to evaluate their mobile strategies, and while Google’s mobile updates aren’t perfect, the message to companies is clear: provide decent mobile experiences, or else.

With mobile usage continuing to skyrocket, it’s no surprise that Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, is also looking at ways to ensure that the search results it delivers to mobile users are capable of delivering the information and answers they’re looking for.

Recently, it began displaying a “Mobile-friendly” tag to search results for sites that it determined provide reasonable mobile experiences.

In the coming months it will go beyond this, incorporating mobile-friendliness as a ranking factor. On the Bing blog, Shyam Jayasankar of the Bing Mobile Relevance Team explained:

Our approach to mobile friendliness as a ranking signal balances the need to improve the ranking for mobile-friendly pages, with the continued focus on delivering the most relevant results for a given query. This means that for mobile searches on Bing, you can always expect to see the most relevant results for a search query ranked higher, even if some of them are not mobile-friendly.

While the changes will improve ranking for mobile-friendly pages, webpages that are highly relevant to the given query that are not yet mobile-friendly will not get penalized. This is a fine balance and getting it right took a few iterations, but we believe we are now close.

According to the blog post, Bing is looking at a variety of factors to determine mobile-friendliness.

These include easy of navigation on touch-based devices, readability without zooming, lack of horizontal scrolling and device compatibility. The latter looks at the use of plugins, like Flash, that are problematic on many mobile devices.

In explaining these factors, Jayasankar compared a number of sites on mobile, showing how Fandango provides good mobile navigation while Movies.com does not, and how Wikipedia’s readability is superior to that of the REI website.

Of course, because Bing says it will still favor overall relevance for mobile search results, the search engine’s changes aren’t nearly as threatening to companies that don’t meet Bing’s mobile-friendliness standards. The world won’t end for them, at least overnight.

But that doesn’t mean that companies companies that aren’t well on their way to delivering excellent mobile experiences aren’t losing out when mobile users click through to their sites. When evaluating whether they’re succeeding on mobile, companies should not assume they’re doing okay simply because the top of the funnel hasn’t decreased in size.

Case in point: according to a BrightLocal survey, 61% of mobile users are more likely to contact a local business if it has a mobile site.

That number is only likely to increase over time as mobile usage continues to grow and consumers become more demanding, so companies need to closely monitor the entire funnel for evidence that their mobile strategies are or aren’t cutting it.

As I wrote at the time, “it’s not hard to imagine Google applying transactional functionality to other types of search,” and product search seemed like one of the most obvious search categories ripe for transactional features.

Global investment in fintech startups is skyrocketing, reflecting a worrying trend for established financial services firms.

Customers are increasingly flocking to a new generation of companies that seek to redefine how consumers save and spend money.

From payments to loans to insurance, established brands are under assault from all directions, but that doesn’t mean they can’t stem the tide, solidify customer relationships and increase customer lifetime value.

Our recent bumper update to the Internet Statistics Compendium this month has seen an especially diverse array of data and trends concerning the world of mobile apps.

Check out the mobile report for the best in app-related research released over the last few months, whether you want to glance over the biggest app categories in a certain market, or want to dig down further into how companies are incorporating apps into their marketing strategy.

According to a newly-published study published by Pew, nearly three-quarters of Facebook users polled said they didn’t know that Facebook generates and stores data about their interests and traits, and, when they came to learn this, over half indicated that they were uncomfortable with Facebook’s practice.

Mastercard, the third-largest credit card processor in the US, has announced a new policy that will make it more difficult for some businesses to automatically convert free trials into recurring subscriptions.